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One week after the national elections, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas president Richard Fisher called Congress on the carpet for its lack of leadership regarding U.S. fiscal policy.

Fisher spoke about the fiscal policy, the Fed’s monetary policies and other issues today at Stanford University’s The State of the West Symposium in Stanford, Calif., and Tuesday night during an interview on CNBC’s The Kudlow Report. Here are some highlights of his comments.

“Our Congress — past and present — has behaved disgracefully in discharging its fiscal duty,” Fisher said today at Stanford, from which he received an MBA degree. “Its members have not shown themselves to be true born leaders.”

The Fed has been “carrying the ball trying to stoke recovery with monetary policy,” Fisher told CNBC. “It would be nice to have the fiscal authorities get their act together so we wouldn’t be dependent on monetary policy. There’s a limit to what we can do. We just can’t have what I call a Buzz Lightyear monetary policy ‘o infinity and beyond.’ “

The central bank has used a monetary policy called quantitative easing, or QE, three times to buy bonds to stimulate the U.S. economy. The last effort was in September, when the Fed launched a $40 billion-a-month, open-ended program to buy mortgage-backed securities and extend low interest rates through at least mid-2015, and there’s speculation of a QE4.

He called for Congressional Democrats and Republicans to work together on fiscal policy.

Fisher described the U.S. economy as “positive, but it’s anemic.”

Texas has seen some of the nation’s strongest job growth — running above 3 percent — but other states are not doing as well, Fisher said. He projected 2-percent job growth nationally for the second half of this year, but that’s not fast enough.

The United States must “completely reboot” tax and spending policies to build confidence in the business community and create jobs, Fisher told CNBC. “Until we give them some clarity, they’re just going to hold back,” he said.

Fed vice chairwoman Janet Yellen earlier this week backed a new policy to keep interest rates near zero through early 2016 and link rates to specific targets for unemployment rate and inflation levels.

On CNBC, Fisher questioned whether that proposal would fix the nation’s “fiscal imbalances.”

There are a lot of stories out today and yesterday about the campaign by some 80 CEOs to fix the federal debt. In short, they are concerned (rightly so) that our runaway federal debt has to be brought under control before it harms the economy (by crowding out private investment, causing government interest rates to spike, etc.) AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is among the execs calling for a solution, as we noted yesterday.

Anxiety over the debt has been building for some time, but now it’s wrapped up in worry over the fiscal cliff, the combination of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to occur (automatically) on Jan. 2. CEOs have been warning about the fiscal cliff for a while, with some business trade groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers, saying it’s already a drag on growth.

But lobbying spending by big firms doesn’t reflect this concern. Look at the chart below, which shows the difference in federal lobby expenditures by Texas’ biggest spenders on lobbying. Most firms reduced lobby spending this year. (Which makes sense, this being an election year during which Congress was expected to accomplish next to nothing.)

AT&T, which is the most active Texas-based public company in Washington, has spent about $2 million less on lobbying this year than during 2011. That’s a 14 percent decline from 2011 (year to date).

The firm with the biggest increase, private-equity investor Lone Star Funds, is an outlier. It didn’t spend much on lobbying until Congress began debate over the Korea Free Trade Agreement. The investment firm hasn’t explained why it was so interested in the Korea FTA, but it stands to reason that it had something to do with Lone Star’s huge fight with the South Korean government over its ownership of Korea Exchange Bank. More on that here if you care.

Home page for Dallas-based Foot Cardigan, an online subscription-based sock-of-the month club that launched in June 2012.

A Dallas start-up is riding election coattails by turning the business of picking the president into a sock race.

Foot Cardigan is a subscription-based sock-of-the-month club launched in June by five guys with day jobs. It’s just the kind of entrepreneurial gumption that should find its way into a small business section of a stump speech, don’t you think?

“Election socks are our jumping off point and we’re happy with the reaction,” said co-founder Bryan DeLuca.

The start-up is hoping its socks sporting Romney and Obama caricatures will lead customers back to them for the holiday shopping season. The basic subscription costs $9 a month for a surprise pair of “delightfully unusual” socks in the mail. It’s a perfect gift for that person who has everything or who has too many socks with holes in them.